ABSTRACT
THE BENEVOLENT TELEVISION GODMOTHER OF THE PRIMETIME woman detective is without doubt Jessica Fletcher of the long-lived series Murder, She Wrote (1984-96). Clever, spry and apparently immortal as played by Angela Lansbury, Ms. Fletcher is the Americanized version of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, so her literary credentials are impeccable. Her television credentials are impressive, too. The longest-running female sleuth in television history, she succeeded in a format that would seem deadly for prime-time ratings. The heroine of Murder, She Wrote was neither young nor sexy, the plotlines neither sleazy nor action-driven, and the format, more than a century old, was the classic whodunit, solved by the superior insight of a chess-playing woman in advanced middle-age.1
